January 21, 2010
The cost of overcommunication within organizations was fleshed out by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks helped run the OS/360 project at IBM, building a giant operating system for the company’s mainframes. In those days, computers were large, room-size, water-cooled machines, sometimes with a massive 256,000 bytes of main memory. OS/360 was probably the largest software project ever attempted to that point. And it was monumentally late.
Every time some aspect of the project fell behind schedule, IBM assigned a few more people to the task. And what Brooks noticed, which still surprises people, is that this didn’t work. His observation came to be known as Brooks’ Law: Adding people to a late project tends to make it run later still.
(Link: A Little Less Conversation – the cost of overcommunication)
